Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Distracted by Life: Lots of good blog fodder in the news lately, but, alas, between patient care and getting the electronic medical system up and running this week, little time for blogging it.

Today, I teach the staff how to use the new computerized medical records. I'm a little worried about their ability to adapt to new technology, or to newness in general. Monday, I introduced them to the new fax/copier/scanner and they were a little freaked just because it doesn't act like the old one. Change is always hard, but add computers to it, especially for folks who came of age before computers were wide spread (or before video games) and its's doubly hard. Yesterday, I overheard the oldest staff member say "computers scare her." We may have a rough couple of weeks, if not months, ahead of us.

I haven't yet gotten to the point that I can say the system makes my work faster. I began trying it myself on Monday, but abandoned it for my old paper ways after two patients. We were busy and I just couldn't handle the volume and make the switch at the same time. My routine is a well-oiled one, and disrupting it slows me down - a lot. The next day, I used it on six patients before abandoning it. But a lot of that slow down is due to data entry. Once my staff knows how to use it, and once our more complicated and established patients have all of their baseline info entered, it should go much smoother and be at least, if not more, efficient than our current paper system.

Meanwhile, it's definitely a mistake to expect the computerized system to reduce errors. (Something I've argued all along. Typos are much more common than hand-written errors. And a second party knows when they can't read handwriting (a signal that they should ask for clarification), they don't know if they're reading a numerical typographical error.)